Today in the series "How to do XYZ with software?":

How to manage books?

You read books at work, you read books at home, you lend books, you buy and sell books. If you do at least one of these tasks, you need to think about a metadata management system. For most people, this is just a (wooden, real-life) bookshelf, where all possessed books are displayed, easily to be sorted by author or colour of the cover. Even then, some help with software might be justified, since you need to package the books for every relocation anyway.
Now let's take a look at a quick&easy way to use software for organising a private book collection.
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I guess most people who believe in conspiracy theories either have some benefit in pretending to believe or they really think the theories are likely to be true. Those who think conspiracy theories are likely to be true, are victims of some kind of "Bayesian fallacy":

Bayes (English mathematician, 1702-1761) proved a theorem about conditional probabilities, nowadays called "Bayes' theorem". Suppose there are two statements A and B, which might overlap (e.g. A="it's raining today" and B="it's raining the whole week"¹, where the truth of B implies the truth of A). Now imagine these statements are more or less likely, so you attach some probability to these statements, p(A) and p(B), with values in 0-100% (or, for the mathematically oriented readers: let p be a probability measure on some discrete $\sigma$-algebra containing A and B). It's not only the probability of A and B we might be interested in, but also the conditional probability "How likely is A when B is true?", which we write p(A|B). Bayes' theorem now reads:
$P(A|B)\cdot P(B) = P(B | A)\cdot P(A)$, and this means in words, that the probability of A under the condition that B is true, multiplied by the probability of B, is the same as the probability of B under the condition that A is true, multiplied by the probability of A.

Continue reading «Why believing in conspiracy theories is wrong»

When I woke up from a dream, I instantly had this idea: What would a file format for odours look like?

I admit: this is one of the most absurd posts ever...

On searching "smell file format", the results are really absurd, too.
Continue reading «the smell file format»

Today in the series "How to do XYZ with software?":

How to manage contacts?

Managing contacts has never been easy - there are various kinds of data floating around (phone numbers, email addresses, private addresses, work addresses, birthdays ...) and the data is always changing ("Hey I got a new phone number ... "). It's better to keep all contacts in one place and to take back-ups of your precious data.

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Today in the series "How to do XYZ with software?":

How to manage photos?

Probably you have some photos on your computer. Probably you even have a digital camera or at least a mobile phone with integrated camera. If you're looking forward to take a second look at your photos in a few years, you'll need to sort, catalogue and back-up your photos! How to do this?

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Today in the series "How to do XYZ with software?":

How to manage music?

Maybe you have a vinyl collection or some cassettes. Maybe you have CDs. Then you're happy, since they can be organised without using a computer. But once you moved your Vinyl/CDs to your computer, to put them on your MP3 player, you need to keep them in order.

Continue reading «Managing music»